That's sad, but it mirrors my experience with commercial customers. Tape is so fiddly but the cost efficiency for large amounts of data and at-rest stability is so good. Tape is caught in a spiral of decreasing market share so industry has no incentive to optimize it.

Edit: Then again, I recently heard a podcast that talked about the relatively good at-rest stability of SATA hard disk drives stored outdoors. >smile<

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duskwuff an hour ago | parent [-]

Tape is also an extraordinarily poor option for a service like Internet Archive which intends to provide interactive, on-demand access to its holdings.

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EvanAnderson 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I presume backing-up the archive is a desirable thing. That's a place where I would see tape fitting well for them.

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stonogo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a common use for tape, which can via tools like HPSS have a couple petabytes of disk in front of it, and present the whole archive in a single POSIX filesystem namespace, handling data migration transparently and making sure hot data is kept on low-latency storage.